Adapting to the Future of Work: our Third Most Imperative Need

In writing to that title, my views are that our most imperative need is adapting to climate change, very closely followed by dealing with inequality, inequity and injustice – not only in nations with well developed economies, where it has received some attention (e.g., Thomas Piketty), but the older problems of poverty, hunger, thirst, preventable disease and poor or bad governance that afflicts too many nations on our little planet (not only are these different facets of the same problem, the attitudes and flaws leading to the different manifestations of that same problem are, in my view, in essence the same).

But after those issues, in my opinion, comes the need to adapt to the changed nature of work as we move into the future.

The discussions (arguments?) about what is causing this (e.g., technology, robots, AI, etc) are all, in my view, moot: what matters is that change will happen, and we can’t – realistically – either ignore it or fight against it.

A couple of centuries ago, workers are supposed to have thrown their wooden shoes, called sabots, into machines – thus giving us the term “sabotage” (a cute story which apparently doesn’t match the etymology), but we still now have a heavily industrialised world.

To go a little further back, there were at least some aspects of the Agricultural Revolution which were opposed - for instance, the practice of enclosures, which at one stage was opposed by England’s Tudor Monarchs as it would “would lead to lower tax revenues, fewer potential military conscripts for the crown, and more potential underclass rebels”. Despite that, and riots, agriculture was revolutionised, leading to unemployment that was – badly – addressed by the English Poor Laws, and a large population of urban workers who helped run the Industrial Revolution.

Now we have a situation where commercial agriculture is – in first world nations – very heavily mechanised, and employs far fewer people.

To some extent, it may be possible to adapt. Apart from the creation of jobs by the Industrial Revolution a century or so after jobs were lost by the Agricultural Revolution, as a more modern example, decades ago bridge design calculations would be performed by teams of engineers using log tables and slide rules (I still have – and can use – a slide rule; my class in high school was the last to learn that, as well as the first to use a computer, at a nearby regional agricultural science institute [it was NOT a personal computer, or anywhere near being a desktop PC]): now, engineers are more likely to be ensuring the calculator and, more recently, computer input is correct and that interpretation of the results is sound, resulting in some engineers still being engaged in bridge design – fewer than decades ago, per bridge, but still there, just as farmers are still present, guiding the machines and making decisions that – at present – machines cannot.

However, ignoring the development of new fields in engineering for the moment, the inescapable reality is, compared to historical times, jobs are fewer in those two example fields.

Now, as mentioned, there has been the development of new jobs in fields that didn’t exist previously – such as computer engineering. However, have those jobs have fully replaced the numbers of jobs that were lost?

As an example, consider the city of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. From here:

·         the population peaked in 1971 at 146,009;

·         “The decline in Newcastle's steelmaking, shipbuilding and other blue-collar industries caused the population to dwindle during the 1980s … until the mid-1990s, when census figures began showing growth”; and

·         the population exceeded 147,000 in 2011.

This webpage has a graph showing an unemployment rate (as a percentage) that peaked in the early-mid 90s, but has now reached a value comparable to the rest of the state of NSW. That suggests to me that the city has, in the last decade or two, got back to the position it was in during the year 1970: what happened to all the extra jobs that should have been there to cater for the natural growth of the city?

To put that another way, over the same period of time, the total population of NSW grew by around 60%: why doesn’t Newcastle have enough jobs to support a population of 230,000, rather than what it was half a century ago?

So what happened to the missing jobs? They went elsewhere, and thus, in my opinion, count as jobs that have been lost and not replaced, no matter that the number of (different) jobs is now what is was half a century ago. They also probably involved a lot of pain owing to unemployment and relocation, with family break ups and other trauma, before people either found new positions or new types of work.

That leads to the issue of changing careers. A great number of words have been devoted to this, at an accelerating rate, however:

1.       some of the proposals which have been made are unsuitable (some are downright ridiculous);

2.       people who are facing the prospect of retraining may also be facing the prospect of financial hardship for themselves and their families;

3.       there is no adequate acknowledgement, that I have come across, of the human disappointment of having to give up something which one enjoyed and possibly looked forward to, let alone the anger that results from having followed the advice one was given younger (back in the day of “careers counselling”) in good faith, only to find one is being viewed as defective for not being able and willing to instantly throw one’s career aspirations out and leap aboard a new and stranger job bandwagon.

That last point does not apply to everyone: some people have drifted into jobs, and are basically working for survival, but the first two points may well apply to those people. Nevertheless, dealing constructively with anger and grief and fear is a major issue, a major block to being able to change successfully, an issue that is only going to grow as the rate of change of work accelerates, and one that continues to – at present – be inadequately addressed.

To digress a little, glib reactions or trivialising or ignoring the issue do not help: the issue, in my opinion, has to be acknowledged sensitively and genuinely by those in society (whether business owners, technical experts, media commentators, politicians, or others) who are leading, advocating for  or implementing changes.

If not, we could find ourselves facing a situation I came across when I was working in Asia a few times in the 90s, where the focus on favouring people having jobs clashed with the Western “ideal” of using mechanisation to get things done more quickly – to no-one’s benefit.

We also need to be wary of getting so caught up in the glitz and glamour of being able to do something that we forget to ask whether we should do that, or whether safeguards are needed. If we don’t, we risk another thalidomide (as morning sickness pill), or Minimata Bay, or Bhopal.

There have been some considerations of how we are going to survive in the future, and some trials are underway of things such as a living wage. The Foundation for Young Australians released an excellent report “The New Work Mindset”, which argues that jobs skills are transportable, and that guidance to young people needs to be based around type of jobs, rather than a specific career. (Unfortunately, older workers who could benefit from the linkages identified by that work haven’t been given access to that information.)

On the other hand, there are also reactions to the growing problem of job insecurity and underemployment based on cutting back personal spending – a reaction which shows that some of the attacks on working conditions in recent times are actually counter-productive (see also here).

I suspect “the answer” to this growing problem will be a combination of many things, much as the Industrial Revolution ultimately led to a combination of measures aimed at protecting workers, consumers and the environment.

To develop that complex set of actions I have termed “the answer”, I consider that we need to:

·         listen to workers (as mentioned, cutting workers conditions – and thus their pay – is also cutting consumer confidence and spending);

·         help workers (things like the “Towards A New Work Mindset” report, and the counselling support being given to workers in industries facing mass layoffs are steps in the right direction, but our careers advisers and job agencies also need to learn how to help people change careers, including people who wish to do so BEFORE they get laid off);

·         listen to managers and business owners (they often have significant responsibilities and challenges, and a complex set of accountabilities to workers, shareholders and regulators. Businesses that employ people are still of great significance, and, as someone whose parents were raised during the Great Depression, I have an innate horror of what being without a job can be like;

·         help managers and business owners (as an example, I have had managers who I would walk over broken glass for, including doing things like unpaid overtime, but others have been so inept at human interactions that all I want to do is work strictly to the letter of agreement. How necessary would cutting penalty rates be if more managers / business owners had the interpersonal skills of the good managers I referred to?);

·         listen to those developing and implementing new technologies (problems – including shortcomings of existing legislation – have, at times, been pointed out by such people [I recall reading such article about 3D printing [“additive printing”], for instance);

·         help those developing and implementing new technologies by making sure they understand that there may be a human / ethical impact from their actions, and they do actually need to spend some effort considering, or working with others who are considering, whether their work should be done, or perhaps should be done with safeguards or that society should be given help to adapt to what this will bring about;

·         help politicians, who do have an incredibly demanding job, to adapt legislation and regulations for the changes that are happening and will come – and in better ways than the old English Poor Laws of the late 1500s. 3D printing and the use of “drones” (pilotless aircraft) are probably obvious modern examples of the need for legislation or other responses (such as training/regulating commercial drone operators), but another is the need to change insurance regulations to ensure that older people are allowed to keep working as our retirement age gets lifted. I also suspect we will see a great deal more one person businesses, and the erratic transition from paying hobby to going concern needs to made far easier and more forgiving.
More importantly, perhaps, government needs to become the leading example of adaptation – we need more job sharing, part time work, flexible work, and deferred deadlines in government and government funded projects to give more people a chance of having a reasonable income for longer.
Getting a project done quickly by fast tracking it looks good in the media, and can help with political battles, but it means there will be  short period of intense and VERY stressful employment, followed by a spike in unemployment and the stress that goes with that.
If this results in a slight cost penalty, then I consider we may need to accept that as the price of surviving as a civil society as we move into the future.

Let me repeat that: we may need to accept that as the price of surviving as a civil society as we move into the future.

It is worth reflecting that we, as a species, have come a long way – from the taming of fire through the taming of plants and animals that we call agriculture, democracy (still, as Winston Churchill said, better than the alternative), the printing press to the nightmare of war in the 20^th Century. We have faced and dealt with an incredible array of issues, problems and challenges; some not so well - the fight against slavery continues now, nearly two and a half millennia after the great Emperor Ashoka banned it, but, on the other hand, human rights is widely accepted as a concept, even if the details are disagreed over, and, in other areas, smallpox was eradicated within a couple of centuries of Jenner’s initial vaccination, and the Green Revolution of the mid-20^th Century was a powerful thing. Other problems are only now becoming fully apparent, two centuries after they started forming – but the ozone hole is shrinking, and new ways of generating electrical power are being developed and implemented.

The nature of future work is one more problem for us to solve - but this time, let’s do it more quickly and less painfully than with others …